We need to start a new crusade in this country. A crusade against the ignorance that has weighed our country down for over a century. Thomas Jefferson began this same crusade back in the 1780s.
“Preach a crusade against ignorance: establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know the people alone can protect us against the evils of misgovernment” ~ Thomas Jefferson
The founding fathers all had similar ideas and planned to educate our people since the founding of our great nation. They knew the education of our people was a necessity to maintain the republic they founded. All the forefathers knew from their historical studies and historical documentation that a nation of ignorance breeds tyranny and anarchy as the end result. Our founding fathers openly expressed their concerns of quality and morality in their descendants. They warned us about the contentment we are now seeing as comfort among our people. They warned us of trading our liberties for security.
We now watch the fears of our forefathers come to life through the destruction of our nation from within by our own people. Their ignorance is on full display for the world to see how far America has fallen from the glorious well-educated proud colonials to what we now see today. These facts are not brought to you by MSM, social platforms, or any educational system we have today, but brought to us by failed policies and a majorly flawed education system birthed by our own government. A system that not only hinders our pursuit of happiness but strips us of all principles we are taught before entering into these government indoctrination camps.
The nation’s youth is fed indoctrination to the point that they don’t even have the primary education to know the difference between tyranny and anarchy. They lack the basic where with all to understand the principles in which this country was founded. The public education system has become a nuisance on society and an endless leech on the taxpayers with no productive results for our country. The educational system we had 20 years ago is the result of activism, anti-nationalism, and emotionalism that we see produced in mass scales today. This political, educational system running our country and used as a weapon against our people and children has set our nation on the fast track to socialism through ignorance.
How did we get here? Well, it was not overnight I can tell you that!
Public education started with Thomas Jefferson and his belief that education was the actual security for the republic they had just founded. He also believed it was the responsibility of the people to educate the population and themselves. Almost every forefather agreed that the people must be educated to maintain their country’s liberties and principles. However, Jefferson never advocated for public schools like we have today and was more concerned over the poor who could not afford tutors for their children.
His plan called for three levels of education: elementary school for the basic knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic. The second was college for moderate degree instruction; this was for the more advanced children that could build on the primary education they had already perfected. Third, an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences, philosophy, and more complex arithmetic. He even laid out a plan for the communities to support their own educational system locally. He proposed a bill to have a school in every county paid for by the hundreds who lived there to help educate the poor.
The purpose of Jefferson’s plan was to help people understand their rights, maintain their rights, and exercise with intelligence their part of self-government. Jefferson even put forth a plan to take the smartest of the poor and utilize them by sending them to college. Jefferson thought they should not do without proper education based on financial restraint. Jefferson honestly believed that many poor held intellectual capabilities and thought it was a waste to deny them education to help them pursue happiness and better the recently founded nation.
Jefferson was not alone in his idea to educate the people of the newly founded country.
America’s oldest forefather, Benjamin Franklin, also felt the people of America should be educated, however, his way of educating them was very different than that of Jefferson. Unlike Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin was self-taught and self-educated. He didn’t come from a prominent family and grew up poor. Franklin believed it was the responsibility of the individual to self educate alongside public education. Franklin formed an academy in 1749 for the education of the youth in the Pennsylvania colony.
He created a pamphlet called “Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” which introduced the faculties that would run the school, and how the school organization would be orchestrated, all the curriculum Franklin found a necessity for the colony’s youth. The curriculum included reading, writing, drawing, mathematics, accounting, astronomy, geography, morality, religion, politics, oratory, debate, logic, language, and natural history. Mechanics, agriculture, and commerce were also listed as attributes that would better the colonies with educated youth and skillsets to pursue happiness.
In Franklin’s pamphlet, the closing simply stated:
“an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, their country, friends and family: which ability is with the blessing of God to be acquired or greatly increased by the true learning and should indeed be the great aim and end of all learning.”
Thus, the academy first founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1749 became the University of Pennsylvania in 1751. Franklin also felt no person’s education should be determined by the color of one’s skin. Frankin believed the Black Americans should be educated just as white children and saw that through scientific observations and studies, the color of one’s skin held no faculties over one’s ability to learn.
In 1757 Franklin traveled to England, the secretary of the Bray Association, an organization dedicated to establishing schools for Black children in the British colonies. They proposed to Frankin opening school likewise in the American colonies, and Franklin agreed and served on the board of the Bray Association for many years. He was very pleased with Black children’s schools that the Bray Association set up in the American colonies. Education for all was most important to Franklin. The fact is that Benjamin Franklin despised slavery, and at the age of 50, Franklin wrote, “life, like a dramatic piece, should finish handsomely.”
The last months of Benjamin Franklin’s life were spent and devoted to eradicating the “atrocious debasement of human nature, negro slavery.”
Jefferson and Franklin were not alone in their quest to educate the people. Alexander Hamilton, who is not one of my favorite forefathers at all and, in my opinion, was full of sh*t ideas; however, I will give credit where credit is due.
Hamilton, just like Frankin, thought education begins with one’s self, and dedication to the learning of genius. Hamilton was like Frankin in some ways. He was self-taught and had the motivation to gain knowledge and better the colonies. Hamilton was brilliant but poorly educated, and fellow constituents knew he had great potential and encouraged his education and motivations. However, Hamilton believed that education was only for the rich, not the poor or Black Americans. Hamilton was taken under the wings of prominent men and sent to Kings College to be educated.
I guess you could say Hamilton was the first hypocrite to serve in our country. Hamilton disagreed that education was for all like the rest of the founding fathers because Hamilton believed people couldn’t be self-governing and thought government rule was the best for the country. He knew educating people would forever keep the people’s freedoms from the government’s reach.
Another founding father who felt education was the key to maintaining a republic was Bedford Gunning Jr., the fifth of eleven children from Delaware and one of America’s founding fathers. Gunning was a well-educated man himself, and at the constitutional convention, he said, “The establishment of schools for the purposes of education is on all hands justly acknowledged to be an object of the first importance.” All the forefathers agreed that it was the duty of all people in each community to help educate their population.
Each forefather agreed on the principles of educating the people of the newfound United States; they all were concrete in their convictions of this principle and the importance it held among them all. I could find a quote by every forefather pertaining to the education of our people, but that doesn’t help you understand how our country and its youth of today have become so lost. Our educational system was not always an indoctrination camp. They started distancing themselves from the original purpose of instilling principles and virtue in education almost 60 years ago with the birth of Unions in our schools. The unions infiltrated the National Education Association (NEA), and that was the beginning of indoctrination as we know it in our educational system.
~MG
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